Darkness & Light: A Frank Elder Mystery (Frank Elder Mysteries)

by John Harvey

  “Just looked in,” Elder said. “Congratulations.”

  “Great result, Frank. For all of us. Me especially, no getting round it. First murder since I made inspector.” He was slightly slurring his words. “Trouble is, now they’ll be expecting me to do it every fuckin’ time. Still, any luck, I’ll end up with a reputation like yours.” He punched Elder lightly on the shoulder. “Cover meself in fuckin’ glory.”

  “First murder case I ever had,” Elder said. “This squad, eight years back now, never solved. No one was ever as much as charged. Still open to this day.”

  “Shame that, Frank. Fuckin’ shame.” Reardon laughed. “Maybe it’s you should be takin’ a leaf out of my book, eh? See how it’s done.”

  Against her better judgement, Prior had said yes to another drink and now sat hemmed in by a bunch of her colleagues with no early chance of escape.

  “You won’t forget,” Elder called out as he was leaving.

  She wouldn’t forget.

  Chapter 38

  IT WAS FOUR, FOUR-THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON, THE SUN still quite strong and the light not yet beginning to fade; what little breeze there was came off the water, bringing with it a smell of the ozone, faint but unmistakable.

  Alice Silverman had moved along the coast when she retired, but not far, a thirties house overlooking the sea just outside Weymouth. By rights it was too large for a now elderly woman living on her own, although there were nieces and nephews who occasionally came to stay when they wanted a cheap holiday, and once in a while her old colleague Jock Mirren would turn up on her doorstep, virtually unannounced, and occupy the spare bedroom for weeks at a time, keeping her awake with his snoring and leaving the room stinking of cigars and whisky and worse.

  When she turned sixty-five, Alice had started to have trouble with her hip, especially when climbing stairs; bursitis, the physiotherapist said, though he didn’t seem entirely sure, and the exercises he prescribed alleviated the pain for a while but no more; her GP had offered an injection of steroids in the chance that might work, but it was a chance Alice had, so far, not opted to take. Stairs she was prepared to take slowly, especially if there was a banister, and normally, as long as she could take her own time, she could manage the slow climb home; it was only those occasions on which the pain afflicted her suddenly, when she was out in the street—on her way back from the library, for instance—and turned her into a crippled old woman, wincing with pain, that she hated it and wanted it gone.

  An old woman. She supposed, to many eyes, that’s what she was: a skinny old woman with white hair.

  Frank Elder had phoned ahead and asked, as persuasively as he could, if she might be prepared to spare him a little of her time; it had been the devil’s own job tracking her down and now that he had found her he hadn’t wanted her to slip through his fingers.

  Perhaps he need not have worried: since time was what Alice Silverman had the most of, she had agreed with little hesitation. If it were convenient for him, why didn’t he come for tea? The bulk of her shopping she had delivered, and there was a rich fruitcake that Jock was wont to say, as he cut himself another slice, went down a treat. It was a long while, longer than she might have liked to admit, since she’d had a conversation, a proper conversation, with anyone, and she did like to talk.

  The house was on a hill, and by the time he arrived, Elder, who, uncertain of his bearings, had parked his car down in the town, was jacketless, his shirt sticking to his back.

  “Mr. Elder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please come in.”

  They sat in the living room: a small table by the picture window, wicker chairs. Tea in white china cups, quite delicate. The cake sat on a Susie Cooper plate Alice had picked up in a charity shop for far less than it was worth; chipped on the underside of one edge, but a bargain for all that. She cared about such things now that she had the time.

  “Mr. Elder, you’re with the police you said?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “You have some kind of identification, of course?”

  There was a letter, signed by the chief constable, inside his wallet.

  She read it carefully then passed it back. “So, how may I help?”

  Elder settled his cup back into its saucer. “Vincent Blaine,” he said. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Alice Silverman was cutting the cake as Elder spoke and the knife slipped just a little in her hand.

  “Vincent,” she said, recovering. “Yes, of course. I can’t claim to have remembered every one of my patients—as the years go by they tend to merge—but Vincent, yes, I do remember him.”

  “I wonder why that is? That you remember him so clearly?”

  “I really can’t say. Some faces, some people, for whatever reason, they stick with you and, as I suggested, some it’s almost impossible to recall.”

  “And this was, what, forty years ago?”

  “Almost. Nineteen sixty-five it would have been, when Vincent was first referred to me.” She sipped her tea. “It was April, I think, near the end of the school term. He was quite small for his age, slightly built; for the first session, the first two sessions, he wouldn’t say a word. Didn’t do anything, wouldn’t play with anything, wouldn’t draw, wouldn’t colour in; he just sat there, head turned away. And then, every so often, he’d look right at you. Suddenly. When you were least expecting it. He wore those glasses, the old National Health kind, round with wire frames, and you could never quite see where his eyes were focusing, except when he was staring straight at you. And then you knew.”

  “He frightened you.”

  “Did he? Yes, I suppose he did. Something... there was something about him I found unnerving.”

  “Can you say what that was?”

  Alice Silverman smiled. “If I’d been able to do that, I might have been more successful. With Vincent, I mean. Even in the relatively little time we had. But I think... let me try... I think in part it was a sense that he knew more than you, better than you—that it was all a game and he knew how to cheat the rules.”

  “So you thought he was manipulating you?”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

  “Is that so unusual?”

  “No. Not at all. I’d say in most cases it happens to some degree.”

  “But with Vincent it was different?”

  “Yes.”

  Alice Silverman took her time, drank some more tea; when she offered Elder a slice of cake he held out his plate.

  “The thing with Vincent,” she said, “his guard was up most of the time; there were relatively few occasions when it came fully down. And when it did, you saw what in a way you expected: he was letting you know he understood all the paraphernalia of the sessions, what it was all for, what I was trying to do, and, for now, he was agreeing to play along. But there was more to it than that. On those occasions he showed more. More of himself. Without meaning to, I think, but I was never certain, not even of that.”

  “And it was, what? Sexual?”

  “Sexual, certainly. At this age especially, the beginnings of adolescence, it’s what you’d expect. But no, there was something about him at those moments that was dangerous. That’s what I remember thinking. Feeling. Dangerous and in some way threatening.”

  “He did frighten you, then?”

  “A little, yes, as I’ve said. Not all the time. But, yes.”

  “You thought he might attack you?”

  The answer didn’t come easily. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  “There in the room?”

  “Perhaps, but that’s a risk you always take and there are precautions... No, I thought... this might sound a little ridiculous, I know... but I thought he might attack me later, outside, when I was alone.”

  “Attack you how?”

  “Well, physically...”

  “Sexually?”

  “Partly, yes. Possibly.”

  “You thought he might try to rape you?”

  “Yes.
” Alice Silverman closed her eyes.

  Elder waited. “But none of this ever happened?” he said.

  “No. I never saw him outside that room.”

  “And these fears of yours, did they lessen in time? As you got to know him?”

  “Not entirely, no. It changed, my feelings changed, but I think I was always uneasy—it’s difficult to explain.”

  Nodding, Elder broke off a piece of cake. “All in all, for how long did you see him?”

  “Just over a year. Until the family moved away.”

  “Long enough to know the cause of his problems?”

  Alice Silverman smiled. “Now I think you’re asking for more than I can give.”

  “Miss Silverman, as I said when I called, I wouldn’t be asking any of this if I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Lives at risk, I believe that’s what you said.”

  “Yes. I don’t think that’s an overstatement. More lives could be at risk.”

  At the word “more,” Alice Silverman narrowed her eyes.

  “What could you tell me,” Elder said, “about Vincent’s relationship with his mother?”

  Despite her best intentions, Alice Silverman found she was smiling. “Perhaps you’ve missed your calling, Mr. Elder?”

  “Anything you think you could tell me,” Elder said, “it might be useful.”

  Alice Silverman turned her head away toward the window; there was a large container ship just visible on the horizon. Much of the earlier blue had been bleached out of the sky. Were lives really at risk, or was that an exaggeration?

  “The way he behaved toward me,” she said slowly, still not looking Elder in the face, “some of the things that emerged in the course of the therapy, they led me to the conclusion that he’d been seduced by his mother. Or, at the very least, that he thought he had.”

  “Isn’t there a big difference?”

  “No, not for someone like Vincent. Reality or fantasy, they’re just as real. As long as he believes what happened to be true.” Neatly, she brushed the cake crumbs from her own plate onto the larger one. “I think I’ve said far more than I should. I only hope it can be of help.”

  “If I could just ask one more thing?”

  “Mr. Elder, really...”

  “It is important.”

  Alice Silverman hesitated a second too long.

  “Someone in the situation you describe, someone who grew into adulthood thinking he’d had sex with his mother, would he be able to control that, forget about it, keep it suppressed?”

  “Hypothetically speaking?”

  “Hypothetically speaking.”

  “He might, he might well. Much of the time. You can never tell. I suspect it would be difficult. But there are ways, strategies someone in that position might adopt.”

  “Such as?”

  “He might, if it were possible, live his life in a very ordered way, keeping everything very tightly under his own control. And that would include relationships, of course, relationships with others.”

  “Other women?”

  “Yes.”

  “He would be able to maintain a satisfactory physical relationship?”

  “Yes. Up to a point. The danger would always be that the Oedipal tension he’s been able to control would become unmanageable.”

  “And what might cause that to happen?”

  “It could be one of any number of things. Something about the particular situation, the woman concerned. Her appearance, for instance, the way she’d done her hair, the clothes she was wearing; a scent, even, a smell, something that would remind him quite vividly of his mother. It might be, also, that his own defenses had been weakened, by alcohol, say, or drugs. What might happen, given that combination, would be that the woman, instead of simply being like his mother, would, to his eyes, become his mother. The ‘as if-ness’ disappears. And that would bring back all the intense feelings of guilt he’d been keeping at bay.”

  “With what result?”

  “It would depend. But one way or another, he would need to lose that guilt and restore equilibrium.”

  “One way or another?”

  Though she was sitting and not walking, no hill to climb, the pain in Alice Silverman’s hip was quite intense. “As well as his own guilt, he might feel extreme anger toward the woman—toward his mother, because at that moment, then, that’s who she is.”

  “Enough that he might want her dead?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The voices of children were raised on the street outside, laggardly on their way home from school.

  “If we can assume for a moment that the man’s anger has been such that the woman has been killed, once that anger has dissipated, which I assume in time it would, how might he then feel?”

  “About himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “More guilt, I suppose. But relief, too. Perhaps, above all, relief.”

  “And the woman, the victim, how would he feel toward her?”

  “Solicitous, I think, caring. Tender, even. She is his mother, after all.”

  Chapter 39

  THE CASE AGAINST RICHARD DOWLAND WAS unravelling. While soil of the same kind as was present on the allotment had been discovered in the cleats of his trainers, it was matted together with that from a number of gardens in the area. He had been close to the murder scene, almost certainly, but when was a matter of conjecture rather than proof. More crucially, although traces of three different kinds of semen had been found on—and in—the dead woman’s body, in no instance did the DNA match Dowland’s.

  “So what the fuck?” Lewis Reardon blustered. “He used a fucking condom, didn’t he? Either that or he didn’t shag her at all. Couldn’t get it fucking up. Why he topped her, more’n likely.”

  And if any of his team raised a questioning voice, Reardon shouted them down.

  “It’s all here, right, on tape. I killed her. Strangled her. You want more proof, get off your arses and find it. I got the confession, you get out there and get the fucking evidence to back it up.”

  But even the confession was starting to look shaky. While not attempting to withdraw it, not exactly, Dowland was becoming less certain in his pronouncements, and frequent mentions of following a woman with red hair were worryingly off track.

  “Time for a rethink?” Prior said in passing, a not altogether unfriendly question.

  “When I want advice from you,” Reardon said, “I’ll fucking ask for it.”

  Anything less aggressive, more contrite, she might have felt a smidgeon of sympathy. But now there was none.

  She was seeing Elder at eleven.

  ANNA INGRAM WAS ON HER WAY TO THE MAIN STAIRCASE when she saw Elder waiting and had to resist the irrational desire to turn around and walk the other way; either that or keep on going, pretend somehow that he wasn’t there.

  There’s nothing else you want to say to me, is there?

  What about?

  I don’t know. Vincent, perhaps?

  He straightened and came toward her, a slight smile and a nod, almost apologetic.

  “You’re not here to take another look at the paintings?” Anna said.

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  She took a step away. “I’ve got a meeting scheduled for ten-thirty.”

  “I won’t detain you long.”

  Anna started to say something, but the words caught on the back of her tongue.

  “That weekend,” Elder said, “in April. The one when Claire Meecham disappeared. You weren’t with Vincent, were you? At the cottage?”

  Anna was already shaking her head.

  “As far as you were concerned at the time, he went there on his own.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s right.”

  She thought she might cry, but looking back at Elder, no tears came.

  “THIS FUCKING GOVERNMENT,” BERNARD YOUNG SAID, “has become so obsessed with fucking targets, it’s all they ever fucking see. And in consequence, we’re cursed with s
pending all our time filling in form after form with figures and percentages for a bunch of gimcrack quangos to analyze in minute fucking detail, so they can tell us, down to the most infinitesimal decimal fucking point, by exactly how much we’re failing. Instead of which, if they sacked their half-arsed focus groups and all the rest of the sycophantic hangers-on, and allowed us to take on more officers instead, we might have a cat in hell’s chance of solving the occasional fucking crime.”

  From her seat on the other side of the superintendent’s desk, Maureen Prior nodded silent agreement; she had heard it all before and would hear it again. Alongside her, Elder continued to study the tops of his shoes.

  “All right,” Young said, “tell me what you have.”

  When they’d finished, Elder doing most of the talking, the superintendent angled himself back in his chair and ran it back through in his mind.

  “What you’ve got,” he said, several moments later, “is Blaine at the site of one murder—Irene Fowler—something we’ve questioned him about before without much joy—and other than the fact he seems to have been lying to his back teeth, precious little to connect him to the second. Your gut feelings, Frank, aside. No firm evidence, no witnesses to place him within half a mile of Claire Meecham at or around the time of her death, no forensics—what you’re basing your case on are the theories of some antique psychotherapist who hasn’t set eyes on Blaine for forty years. Is that right? Or am I missing something?”

  “No,” Elder said. “Not a thing.”

  Young unfastened the final button of his jacket; too much lunch too fast and, for once, the bloody Rennies didn’t seem to be working. “So,” he said, “what do you want to do?”

  “What I’d like,” Elder said, “is a chance to look round Blaine’s place in Dorset. See if we can’t find some evidence Claire Meecham was there.”

  “And I can see the look on the magistrate’s face when I ask for a warrant. No, what we do, bring him in, let Maureen question him, see if we can’t make him sweat a little. Take it from there. Okay?”